The Downside of Handshake Agreements? Everything.
A not-so-fun note from a reader:
When I went to work for my former employer he gave me a ten year commitment, he said that he would give me a piece of the company if I stayed ten years. I stayed the ten years and when I asked him to make good he told me that no man in his right mind would expect him to keep a promise he made ten years ago. I quit two weeks later, and he kept my final weeks pay and the three weeks vacation pay I had coming. He had set precedent many times that he paid quitting employees their vacations but did not pay mine.
Furthermore, I worked many of those years as a salesman and a selling manager. Many of the manufacturers that the company represented paid a “retail salespersons spiff ranging from 100 to 500 dollars per unit sold. This same owner for ten years kept every single spiff for himself with now written agreement signed by me giving up this money.
This is not going to be great news for the reader but I’ll try to give him a little hope. Also, I’m not a lawyer so don’t print this off and take it to court.
Here is what you should definitely get:
- Your final week of pay - I would stop into the closest Labor and Industries office in your state and fill out a loss wage claim. You legally deserve to be paid for time worked.
What you could possibly get:
- Your three weeks of vacation - If he’s done it before in similar situations, you could get it back. No written policies make it difficult though. You can include that amount when you file at the L&I office.
What you’re probably not going to get:
- A stake in the business or a settlement for breach of contract - Unless the guy is an idiot, he’s not going to admit he made you the verbal offer a decade ago. Unless you can find someone to verify, you may be out of luck but I guess nothing is impossible.
What you’re not going to get:
- Your spiffs from the vendor - You signed a written agreement (seemingly the only written agreement in this whole thing). The only thing that I can see as a possibility is if those spiffs were in the sales contract between the vendor and the company you worked for. Then you may have a snowball’s chance in hell but more than likely, the vendor is going to recoup most of that.
Maybe other readers have some additional input here? What do you think, do you think the reader here has a chance with a stake in the business or spiffs?
Three Reasons for HR People to get Online
So I was sort of thinking back to the beginning of my blogging days and laughing. My first attempt at blogging was undeniably stupid and it is only thanks to the fine folks over at archive.org that we have a copy of that project in 2001. Daily updates, e-mailed newsletters, and everything else a 19 year old kid could think of to make other 19 year old kids laugh. The name of the site was Lactose Overdose for Pete’s sake! It was not pretty.
Fast forward to today and things haven’t changed much.
Granted, things are nicer in the blogging world. We’re no longer using tables. Style sheets helped. And it is super easy to update this here blog. Plus it is easier to follow multiple blogs through RSS and customized e-mail subscriptions. But…
It is 2008 and we still have very few HR people blogging and interacting on social networks. In fact, if you discount the recruiting community (which has really had a nice web presence since 2003-2004), there were only a couple true HR blogs I was following when I first started blogging over two years ago. When I was talking to a friend about how great blogging has been for me, he asked how many HR blogs I followed and I could list maybe a couple handful. I consider myself a pretty engaged HR social media guy too.
When I started HRM Today, I really thought I could work on getting more and more HR people online. Now I have started to think of other ways of getting HR people involved online besides my site. But who cares about all of that if people don’t even know why they should be online?
Here are three reasons why every HR person should be blogging, be a part of a social network other than LinkedIn and get engaged in the online HR community.
- Street Cred, Google Juice, Online Identity - Do you want to control what is out there when somebody searches for your name online? Take control by blogging and joining social networks under your name. If you look at my name in google, you can see that blogs and social networking sites rank higher. I have control of everything that is seen on that first page so I get to determine what my image is online. That is going to continue to be a big advantage.
- Networking, Networking, Networking - Imagine the potential to network with thousands of other HR professionals? That’s what the internet gives you and more. The best part is that you aren’t restricted by geography and it is often easier to network with busy HR professionals online. What can networking give you? Better business contacts, industry leaders and increased job search ability.
- Personal Development - I have learned a lot from being involved in the recruiting community. Unfortunately, they don’t teach you much about recruiting in school and you end up learning much more about it as a job seeker. Many contributors in the recruiting community hold free webinars about sourcing candidates or figuring out how to contact that high performer at another company. The same thing could happen in the HR community with more participation.
Maybe you are a lurker to this site. You come in, you read and you either take away something or you don’t and you go about your day. And while I would say that it is better than no social media interaction, I really think you are only getting a fraction of value out of it that you could if you were participating in the discussion.
If you’re looking to get involved quickly, check out four great HR resources to get you on your way.
Guest Post: HR Managers as Communications Facilitators
Note: This is a guest post from author Heather Johnson (who also did a post on networking as well). If you are interested in doing a guest post or would like me to do a guest post on your blog, contact me.
A study conducted by international consulting firm Randstad and Harris Interactive shows that only 32 percent of employees believe that the companies they work for are capable of achieving organizational excellence. The reason they cite for this primary inability is poor communication. Effective and proper communication between employers and employees and proper management of the flows of information are some of the main drivers of sustained success in any corporation, so if there are no established channels of communication in place or if any of these should break down for some reason or the other, it could lead to disastrous consequences. With HR managers being the mainstay of the communications function in any organization, it’s time they realized how important the role they play as facilitator is to the company:
- Human resources personnel must ensure that the proper foundation is laid for effective communication to take place. They must make sure that employees are receptive to the ideas and information that are imparted to them. The only way to achieve this is to ensure that employees are satisfied with the core aspects of their job, like salary, work routine and understanding colleagues and superiors.
- HR managers must play an active role in not just communicating changes in the organization to its employees but in also helping them understand why these changes are taking place, how decisions are made, how these decisions affect them, and the role they play in these decisions. Trust and loyalty are essential qualities needed in employees during organizational changes, and these are characteristics that are built only through effective and honest communication. Proper communication channels are necessary to ensure that the rumor mills don’t work overtime and generate negative feelings all around.
- Effective communication opens the gates to measuring employee motivation and commitment – when employees are rated on how whether they received the message that was communicated, how they interpreted it, and how they reacted to what was said, it’s easy to gauge their feelings towards the company.
- HR personnel must have their finger on the pulse of the relationship between employees and their immediate manager or supervisor. The communication between these two entities must be strong so that each employee knows where their job fits in and how important their work is to the company.
- It is important that negative aspects be laid out in the open as soon as possible with no room for stalling.
- The message and the medium should be chosen with care depending on the former’s importance or lack of it. Personal communication is suited for the more serious issues while a memo or an email will do for routine matters.
- For communication to be effective and bring about a change in employees’ attitude towards the organization, it has to be regular and honest.
This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of talent agent. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.
Boss Sleeping on the Job? Google it!
I like occasionally going through my statistics and figuring out how people get to my site. But when I saw a Google search on “boss sleeping on the job” pointing to my site though, I thought it might be fun as a Friday post to go over the ten most ridiculous search terms that brought people to YourHRGuy.com this week. So without further ado…
10. “Am I going to get fired” - Gee, if I knew that, this site would be by paid subscription.
9. “How to get fired gracefully” - I want to believe this is the same person as number ten
8. “Blogher sucks” - Okay? So don’t go!
7. “If I’m so great of an employee, why am I stuck here” - Because it is easier than the alternatives.
6. “hrmarketer good?” - I don’t know, ask him
5. “What does a human resources person do?” - He blogs about you day and night. Some other stuff too, I forget.
4. “what is generation x like?” - I wish I knew. The only thing I can say is that they are older than the bratty kids and younger than the old geezers on their way to retirement.
3. “what if company has no hr?” - Count your lucky stars. Granted your employer is probably doing a few things illegally, you probably also have a few hundred less useless policies.
2. “Sleeping with the boss at IBM” - I wish I had blogged about some of these things. In case you’re wondering, it is probably a bad idea, even at IBM.
1. “big women in daisy dukes” - See, I had a guest blogger who talked about daisy dukes and now I get a handful of search terms a week from disappointed daisy dukes viewers. Sorry guys.
What employees deserve (and don’t deserve)?
I swear this hasn’t turned into a sports blog yet but it always seems to go back there for me. I love sports, I love HR and I love analogies so those three things really work for me. My Brett Favre article along with Kris Dunn’s over at Fistful of Talent have slowly attracted the dreaded Favre sympathizers. I don’t mean dreaded as in “Agh, I hate them” but more along the lines of “Hm, I should have explained myself better and now it is going to be an entirely new post.”
First of all, I want to acknowledge that the NFL is special. It doesn’t have to worry about things like being a monopoly, it has a collective bargaining agreement, a union and a ton of different levels of contracted employees. So to say the NFL is unique is an understatement, it is unlike all other non-sport businesses.
That being said, the general philosophy is the same: clubs that have been losing for the past umpteen years, have terrible management or make bad employee choices continue to fail at attracting the kind of talent that will help them win.
That’s why the Brett Favre scenario is awful to me. Here is a guy who is currently on contract for the Green Bay Packers. He is clearly still the best Packer player. He did the retire/unretire thing. Pretending he was forced to is a silly argument considering how much power he has as the best player on the team. And Green Bay has botched the situation as bad as any club can.
Still, what it comes down to is what Brett Favre deserves. That seems pretty simple to me:
- He deserves to play out his contract if he wants. That’s the obligation he signed. I don’t think there is a “I’ll be a starter” clause in the contract so whether he starts or not is a coaching decision, not management.
- He deserves to be treated with respect. That means if he comes back and the Packers want to trade him, they should try to find a good fit with another club if at all possible.
In my mind, the organization’s commitment to the team and the owners (a.k.a. Green Bay) outweighs the commitment to a single player (even the best player). Releasing him would be foolish and could hurt the team and owners if he signed with a divisional rival. No matter how important and loyal a person has been to the organization, you can’t allow something like that to happen if it is preventable. If Green Bay wants to get rid of Favre, they deserve to get something for that. That serves the organization and team much better than releasing him. Those are the only two things either party deserves.
And really, Green Bay fans should accept the fact that with or without Favre, they aren’t winning the Superbowl next year. End of story. So if you knew that, no matter what you did as a club, you weren’t going to win a Superbowl this year, what would you choose? It seems obvious doesn’t it?
How to do better at hiring?
Check out the post over on HRM Today about Alexandra Levit’s new book Success for Hire and some of the tips it gives. It is a great read (the book, not my review).
Do you have HRM Today in your feed readeryet ? If not, click here and add it. There are some great articles going up daily (by other people, not me).
ROWE is dead and I am sad
The Happy Employee made a post about the new book about Results-Only Work Environment and mentioned that absolutely zero HR bloggers had mentioned it. Count me as one of those people who are unsurprised by this revelation.
I know that this is a hard thing to swallow from someone who has very much advocated ROWE in the past. There are some things holding people back from advocating ROWE and I want to address them here:
- HR people don’t trust the system - HR people in general don’t trust employees or managers to do the right thing so they’d rather not rock the boat and expose their weaknesses as an organization. They believe by keeping people at work, they can compensate by being able to monitor what a person is doing every minute of the day.
- Managers don’t trust their employees - Instead of seeing the benefits in recruiting and retention that this program would bring, managers focus on how their lowest performers would do. Instead of admitting their weakness in developing their own employees, they would rather compensate by punishing their best workers.
- Managing by results scares everyone (except your high performers) - This is the big one. If you don’t feel confident that you can manage people by the results they bring to the organization, then what are you managing them by? I can tell you but you’ll never admit it: attendance and keeping busy. If you can’t manage in a results-only way, that’s what you’d prefer to manage by.
Look, ROWE is radical because it is something that is common sense based but is hard to wrap old school (and even some new school) minds around. If you ask a business person what they are hiring a person to do, 100% of the time they should say “to do [insert something].” Yet almost all of those business people will also manage not based on whether someone is doing that something but also on a litany of non-related criteria (whether or not you’re chained to the desk properly). If a person is successful at doing their job well and can do it working from home, on a schedule they dictate, isn’t that better (especially if that person is happier)?
I almost always get an e-mail or comment insinuating that I’d just rather work at home all day and not come into the office. No, I’ve done that already. I want to be in the office (if at least for a little bit).
I’d like to believe ROWE is going to be adopted on a large scale but I am not that foolishly optimistic. I am guessing that ROWE will get implemented at progressive large corporations and smaller companies that are looking for that competitive edge.
Flexibility is low cost and it is absolutely stunning to me that people can’t see the huge low cost opportunity that is standing right in front of them.
DHS asks: How dare you question us!
In one of the most insulting posts I’ve read in a while, the Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary to Policy writes a scathing critique of SHRM’s lobbying to delay federal requirements to require E-Verify for certain employers.
I have a problems with SHRM and I’ve disagreed with their lobbying in the past but on this issue SHRM is right on and our government is trying to use its bully pulpit to shut down one of the legitimate arguments against mandatory use of the E-Verify system.
What is E-Verify
E-Verify is a DHS sponsored program to help employers verify whether a person is legally able to work in the US. Right now, this is a voluntary program but DHS wants to extend the program to include all federal contractors. Sounds good, right?
There are major problems with E-Verify as it stands right now. [1] [2] [3] [4]
The biggest one right now is that studies have indicated that at least 4% of the records are inaccurate. That’s inaccurate as in people who are currently okay to work in this country would be incorrectly identified as being ineligible. What could these inaccuracies lead to? Oh, nothing too big besides losing your job or being unfairly rejected for employment. But the good news is, once you actually do get your records fixed so that you show up as verified, someone will probably already have the job you lost.
DHS Says “Like the System or You Are Advocating for Hiring Illegal Aliens”
I love that an Assistant Secretary in one of the most powerful executive branches has to resort to name calling and straw men as responses to SHRM’s legitimate effort to at least delay an errant program. If there are significant issues with the database being used and it is going to hurt our hiring efforts by denying legitimate employees opportunities, why shouldn’t SHRM be arguing against a program like this? Even if the number was only 1%, that would still involve the lives of around 1.5 million American workers not being able to obtain employment. Only the size of a major American city.
I don’t understand how anyone can be okay with error rates like this and to shift the burden of proof and correction from the government to the employee. Bring in your passport or social security card but if the system rejects you, it is now your responsibility to go correct an error that DHS made with your file. Oh, and while you’re correcting it, you can’t receive a paycheck. Good luck!
Arrogance Leads to Dismissal of Outside Experts
Assistant Secretary Baker’s arrogance cannot be understated and he acts like a typical career bureaucrat in his entire message. The best part about this whole story though is that DHS never once met with the largest organization representing HR professionals in the development of E-Verify. Must I even mention that HR professionals will be the only people who use this system and DHS thought they knew better than us.
I haven’t met an HR professional that wants to hire illegal aliens. Whether it be for the embarrassment, the fines or their own sake, I think any HR person would love to have a system that would verify whether a person was legally able to work. It is one less thing we would have to worry about.
I guess it is easier to sit at your desk and never have to speak to people or businesses that are impacted by your product (i.e. the best thing available because it is the ONLY thing available). While it is nice to have a government blog (one that is even open to commenting), sometimes I wish I was more in the dark about what our bureaucrats spend their time and energies on. If only this sort of passion led to a better system, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Brett Favre, Green Bay and Losing Your Best Guy
If you haven’t been following the Brett Favre unretirement story, bless your heart. From the perspective of an HR person, it is a gut wrenching affair that I hope I never have the pleasure of dealing with. Here is the scenario from my demented HR side:
- Your longest serving and best employee (and one of the best employees the industry has ever seen) is on contract with you.
- He has been mulling retirement for several years.
- He finally decides this year is it for him. You understand but you need to move on as a company.
- Right before the busiest season of the year, your retired employee wants to come back to work for you and he wants all of his old accounts back.
- You tell him that you’ve given them to the journeyman who replaced him in March.
- He asks to be released from his contract so he can go work for your direct competitor.
- You say “No, you can come back but you’re going to have to earn your accounts back.”
- He doesn’t like that and goes to the biggest industry magazine and gives an interview saying that he doesn’t feel welcome back at his old company and that because of his years of service, he should simply be released.
What do you do as a manager?
Oh, and by the way, the stockholders are well informed of the entire situation and are closely watching your every move. No pressure.
Brett Favre is inarguably the best player on his team even at retirement age. He also has a legacy with Green Bay and the shareholder fans of Green Bay absolutely love him.
That being said, the Packers are a business and he needs to understand that it would be absolutely foolish to release him to a competitor without getting something back in return. As a contracted employee, Favre is in the inenviable spot of being subject to management’s discretion regarding him playing in the game, being traded or allowing him to be released unrestricted.
Now the Packers, to my understanding, have allowed Favre the opportunity to list teams that he would rather be traded for and they could easily get a high draft pick for Favre. And ultimately, they’d love to ship him out of their conference in order to lower the possibility they would be playing against him the next couple of years. It would be the equivalent of saying that in order to release you from the contract (which both parties mutually agreed to), you have to sign a non-compete agreement to not play in our division. I think that would be pretty reasonable.
I am glad the Packers have taken a stand even though I think they killed themselves on the PR side of this. They have to stand up for the employees and they can’t let one person (even if it is the best employee) dictate their entire operation. It has been 11 years since they have won a Superbowl and they aren’t going to do it in the next two years whether or not Favre is playing for them. If Green Bay shareholders can come to accept that, they should be able to see the logic in finding an amicable way to trade or release him without hurting themselves.
Balancing Work, Another Job and a Life
As many of you know, I am big into work/life balance. I have also been lucky enough to work for employers that have valued that as well. Now though, it seems that I am running into a little conundrum because that work/life balance has turned into work/work/life balance and I didn’t even take on a second job! At least not deliberately. Let’s list the issues:
- I have a day job. It runs 8-5pm with little (if any) overtime. Some travel involved but not enough to really get excited over. No the job isn’t super sexy. But yes, lucky me: I have a life.
- I am now essentially moonlighting as a blogger. Two independent sites going (this one and HRM Today), a blog on Vault.com, as well as exclusive sponsorship of a social network (HR Bloggers). My monthly income from blogging is roughly half that of my day job. It could be more if I worked harder at it (sponsorships, advertising, etc) but again, work/life balance.
- Then life. My routine has been to come home and spend the first couple of hours focused on my wife, have dinner and talk about what is going on. Then she wants to watch a little TV or read and I get online and do my blogging. Until when? Sometimes 1am. Then to bed and up again at 6:30. The good? Weekends are intact. I rarely touch the computer on the weekend and if I do, it isn’t usually more than an hour.
How do I resist the urge to check my blog stats every five minutes or stay on my cell phone? How does my wife not want to kill me every night (she still may want to on occasion)? I think I do it by following some easy steps:
- Set your computer boundaries - I want to be either on the computer being productive or off it doing something else. No computer games, not much in the way of personal blogging, no chat, no twitter.
- Set your phone boundaries - I check my emails on my phone in the morning before work and after work on the way home. I can worry less about email when I want to spend time with my wife.
- Set your hours - I don’t want to be blogging at 1am but sometimes I am. I do very well on the weekends but I need to do a better job on work days.
- Set up an end game - Is there a breaking point with having essentially two jobs? I know there is because I’ve worked with employees who have dealt with it. It is critical to understand where your break point is and to have a plan to go one way or the other.
This post started out as a gripe post but I realized that it would seem silly to gripe about the opportunities I have and to complain about coping with it. I am grateful that I have abundant opportunities and I do get tired of people saying “Agh, I am so busy and life isn’t fair.” So turn it into a positive: being busy is either a function of having lots of opportunites (yay!) or inefficiency (something that can be easily fixed!).
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About
Your HR Guy is a Human Resources Generalist practicing in the field. But don't let that fool you, this isn't a boring blog. I seek relevance and humor in a place we will spend much of our lives. Everything from workplace issues, job seeking and terrible bosses. Read more...
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